Comment, Pt. I

For seventy-two hours last week, everyone in America was thinking like a novelist. No matter where you went or whom you talked to, the conversation always seemed to turn to the story of Clarence Thomas, the federal judge nominated by President Bush to serve on the Supreme Court, and Anita Hill, the Oklahoma law professor who testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him, in the early nineteen-eighties. So many ideas of decency and fair-mindedness were brutalized during those three days, and so many feelings of anger and resentment were exposed, that it became almost a therapeutic necessity to invent a narrative that might give some meaning to events that were being experienced as a kind of psychic explosion.

The hastily organized Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that followed the revelation of Hill’s accusation were attacked almost immediately by many of Thomas’s supporters—and, with considerable force and bitterness, by Thomas himself, when he made his electrifying appearance before the committee on Friday night—as a travesty, a hopelessly misconceived attempt to use a political process to settle a dispute about facts. By the end of the weekend, even those who did not wish the nomination well had come to feel the same way, for the hearings became a political free-for- all, in which senators demonstrated a willingness to stoop to anything, from cheap prosecutorial trickery to outright smears, in order to impeach witnesses whose evidence served the cause of the other side. When Senator Alan Simpson announced that he had in his pocket communications containing damaging “stuff” about Professor Hill, it was impossible not to be reminded of another senator, forty-one years ago, in Wheeling, West Virginia, waving a sheet of paper supposed to contain the names of two hundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The Democratic inquisitors, too, showed themselves fully capable of deplorable tactics—as when Senator Howard Metzenbaum, late on the final night of hearings, went out of his way to try to put on the record an unsubstantiated smear against one witness, John Doggett, whose testimony had already been discredited under questioning by the committee’s chairman, Senator Joseph Biden.

Yet even if the committee had been able to put politics to one side, and to observe a proper investigative decorum in its efforts to uncover the facts, it would probably never have been able to satisfy the general desire to know what had really taken place between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. As the hearings went on, it began to seem to many people that the truth in this matter lay somewhere beyond the reach of legal processes: clearly, someone was lying, and it may be that only the two principals will ever know which one it was. To understand how Thomas and Hill had come to this moment in their lives, one needed not a history of facts but a history of consciousnesses. And this is why so many Americans found themselves, when they tried to explain the matter to one another, sounding like novelists.

Some of the novelizing was merely sensational. In one frequently heard version, Hill nurses a passion for Thomas, and his indifference leads her finally, after years of hope, to stage her terrible revenge. This story is particularly flimsy because it is sustained by so little evidence, and because it leaves so many strands dangling—such as the testimony from several witnesses that Hill had complained about sexual harassment almost from the beginning of her association with Thomas. And Hill’s demeanor, as it appeared on television, was missing the gleam of spitefulness that a tale of spurned love requires. You could sometimes hear a more gothic variation of the story, in which Hill and Thomas had once been lovers—though when the puzzle was framed in this way almost none of the pieces could be made to fit.

Conspiratorial versions, modelled on political thrillers, also came forth, and they were no less shoddily constructed— despite an endorsement from Thomas himself, who implied during his testimony that he had been made the victim of a cleverly designed plot. But as Hill’s political conservatism became more obvious, tales involving unscrupulous Senate staffers and liberal advocacy groups (with, as Senator Orrin Hatch put it, their “slick lawyers, the worst kind”) were heard less often. So were this story’s more baroque versions, in which Hill’s complaint is leaked to the press by Republicans, who then use it as a stick to beat the Democrats, or in which the Democrats deliberately lose the contest over Thomas, in order to drive female voters away from President Bush in the next election. There was undoubtedly some skullduggery behind the events that flushed Professor Hill into public view, but political machinations were not where the real drama lay.

The term “Dickensian” turned up in many conversations about the hearings, but only the senators, so rigidly encased in their public personalities and so fantastically uncensored in their utterances, seemed truly Dickensian. Thomas and Hill were never Dickensian, and neither (except, perhaps, for Mr. Doggett and Charles Kothe, the retired law-school dean from Oral Roberts University) were the other witnesses. The feeling that there must be an element of the demonic in the story—whether in the enormity of Hill’s inventions (if she was making it all up) or in the fury of Thomas’s denial (if he was lying)—led some people, including members of the committee, to use the word “tragedy,” and others to mention Kafka (as Thomas himself did). But the outcome was neither tragic nor absurd. For such readings of the story to ring true, Thomas would have had to fall—either because his own past errors had returned in nightmare form to destroy him or because he had fatally misjudged the loyalty and character of a protégée—and he did not fall.

Thomas’s success—if it can be called that, after the protracted and exhausting proceedings, and after he was made a Supreme Court Justice for life by a margin of only four votes—is just what gives the event its extraordinary resonance. Hill and Thomas are enormous characters. This became clear during the testimony of the corroborating witnesses—the men and women who were part of the world in which Hill and Thomas had once worked. Those witnesses seemed honest, genuine, and intelligent, but they appeared to be people more or less like the rest of us, and it is perfectly obvious to those who doubt his denials why Thomas could have behaved toward Hill in ways he would never have behaved toward the women who spoke in his behalf—just as it is clear why Thomas’s behavior toward her would matter far more deeply to Hill than the behavior of the other men in her circle. The man who muscled his way up from Pin Point, Georgia, with an unshakable belief in his own righteousness, and the woman from Morris, Oklahoma, whose spiritual integrity is mixed with a fierce ambition, must have recognized each other immediately. Whatever else their relationship involved, it must have included a test of wills, which made it unlike any ordinary office relationship.

No legal account can recognize this, of course. It cannot matter that Hill is a striking and exceptionally self-confident woman, or that Thomas is a forceful and exceptionally self-confident man. If he did those things to her, one continually heard, he must have done them to other women, too, or if she had invented this story about him, she must have invented things about other men as well. Everyone looked for “patterns.” But characters like Thomas and Hill don’t fit into patterns.

The people who ended by believing Thomas were able to cast the events as the story of a terrible ordeal successfully overcome. The people who believed Hill had a harder time justifying what happened. In the greatest novels—those, say, of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal and James—the collision between truth and the world can have only one outcome, since the world will put on any mask, stoop to any deception, to protect itself, and truth cannot. Many people who were willing to believe Hill’s story thought that she should have fought back when Thomas tried to harass her, or should have shrugged it off; and for some of these people the lies that Thomas had to tell (as they saw it) were a justifiable route around an obstacle he should never have had to confront. And if Hill was telling the truth it might be that Thomas, who by all accounts gave her in her subsequent career every professional assistance he could, felt that he had earned a reprieve from things he had, in a weak or uncalculating moment, once done to her. The anger he displayed before the committee would not have seemed so genuine, perhaps, if he had not, in some deep, Nixonian way, justified his behavior to himself first. But Hill, although virtually abandoned by the senators who had forced on her the task of bringing down a Supreme Court nominee, stood her ground. She had never insisted on “winning,” only on telling the truth, and, despite the opinion polls, she was not discredited. Still, for those who had hoped that Thomas’s nomination would be defeated, the story has the wrong ending. It will not be a consolation to them to be reminded that all the great stories have the wrong ending. ♦

Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001.